Bertarelli Summer2024 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 34
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a few hours after sunset anywhere
in the tropics. A few days ago, the full moon rose above the ocean
and, like the final piece of a puzzle clicking into place, it set in
motion the most consequential event in the life of a coral: sending
offspring into the future.
Like us, coral are animals. But stuck to the seafloor they can’t go out
and find a mate. Instead, many species of coral spawn with unique timing
known only to their kind, giving their eggs and sperm, collectively called
gametes, the best shot at meeting each other, fertilizing, and growing
into a tiny larva half the size of a rice grain. A few days to a few weeks
later, if the larva is lucky, it will find a spot on the seafloor and begin to
build, molecule-by-molecule, a calcium carbonate skeleton adding to
the greatest biological structures on our planet.
Romantic as all this moonlit mingling is, it’s also been a major stumbling block for coral scientists. “Basic information about reproduction
is critical to develop a conservation plan for any animal,” coral scientist
and aquarist Jamie Craggs explains. With corals spawning just once a year
and scuba divers limited in the number of corals they can watch a night,
progress understanding coral reproduction has been unbearably slow
for decades.
Scientists are also racing to better understand what helps coral
ecosystems thrive. Research in remote islands in the Indian Ocean has
uncovered surprising connections between the nutrients in seabird
guano and healthy reefs. Working in these finely-balanced systems,
Lancaster University’s Nicholas Graham discovered that where invasive
rodents have depressed seabird populations, coral suffer significantly.
Such work provides key information to conservation plans for coral
reefs, whose intricate architecture provides habitat to nearly 900,000
species, a quarter of all that live in the sea.
And today’s coral are in dire need of such conservation plans. The
most recent United Nations Framework on Climate Change predicts
that by 2050, 99 percent of all corals will be lost due to warming ocean
waters. Like Craggs, working in aquariums, and Graham, studying reefs
in the field, researchers are urgently looking for solutions. While the
corals wait for climate change to be addressed, these scientists are
finding them.
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T9S A STEAMY SUMMER NIGHT
